AIPAC is driven by a bunch of right-wing troglodytes intoxicated by a vision of Israel at perpetual war -- and they have somehow managed to monopolize all public debate in the US about Israel. They hate Jimmy Carter, for instance, because he thwarted their influence and brought lasting peace between Israel and Egypt after a generation of bloodshed -- an indelible refutation of their claim to represent Israel's interests. Desperate to avoid a repeat, they obliged Bill Clinton to let up the pressure for an Israeli-Palestinian accord despite the pleas of Israel's own negotiating team that he not do so.

Israelis themselves have complicated, self-contradictory views, and are not always wise (in this respect they are much like Americans), but they are by no means wholly of the same mind as AIPAC. It's a mistake of the first order to let a discussion of how Israelis feel about the upcoming American election elide into a discussion of AIPAC's position. AIPAC only wishes that there was the same kind of lockstep in Israel as they command in America.

conspiring to murder, kidnap and maim people overseas and providing material support to terrorists...

That's it? That's the sum total of their case? That's the reason why for all these years they had to play hot potato with this guy? For this Americans sacrificed all that we hold dear? The freaking CIA helped al Quaeda more than this guy did. That shit is weak.

So what are the eager suckups to Bush-the-tough-guy going to say now? Make some kind of Schroedingerian claim about how if only we hadn't actually brought him to trial he still would have possessed some kind of guilt by virtue of quantum uncertainty? But all those liberals in the court system have, by examining the case, turned him into a small-time, third-rate crook?

Please, I beseech you, people of America, develop the gonads to put a stop to this in 2008.

And here's a recommendation for passengers: Learn the system.

Don't forget location, location, location. I've been honestly surprised by reports of how awful air travel is these days -- I seem to always miss the horrifying experiences that other passengers report as commonplace. Reading "Ask the Pilot" I'm beginning to think that at least one reason must be that, as a frequent Southwest customer (sorry, Patrick), I generally fly out of second-tier regional airports rather than main metropolitan ones. Oakland instead of SFO, Long Beach instead of LAX, Midway instead of O'Hare, BWI instead of National.

Southwest's history and business model have resulted in serious infrastucture investment in these smaller airports, many of which were regarded as sleepy stepcousins before the cattle car airline came along and put them on the map. The result is what you'd expect -- not everything runs on time all the time but overall it's incredibly smooth. I fly very frequently and can count on one hand the number of times I've been seriously delayed. The only downside is having a little further to travel on the ground on the terminal end.

But it's a price that savvy flyers are willing to pay. Little T F Green Airport in Rhode Island was a backwater until Southwest, shut out of Logan by the majors' scheming, essentially subsidized a massive expansion and turned Green into its New England beachhead. To this day Southwest still doesn't operate out of Logan but the mountain has been moving to Mohammad -- Boston travelers are increasingly choosing the inconvenience of traveling an hour to Rhode Island to fly rather than to run the gauntlet at Logan, even shelling out $100.+ in cab fare.

So bring on the RJs, and the LJs and the air taxis too -- just stop trying to cram them into the landing queues at the metropolitan hubs. There are any number of underutilized regional airports that could use the business, and it would probably end up being more pleasant if not actually faster for all those irate passengers too.

This was an unusually lucid, articulate, and helpful article even for "How the World Works" -- very much in the classic style of the column.

I'd like to add one thing, which is that homeowner mortgages have a peculiar place in the investment world because they're backed by the US government mortgage insurance corporations. The idea was always to encourage the American Dream by reducing the risk that lenders face if a home loan should go bad. In order to discourage lending institutions from going overboard at the government's expense there have traditionally been a host of regulations that limit how "out there" mortgage lenders can go in terms of risk.

But over the past 20 years those regulations have been broken down, at the behest of the lending industry, and between one thing and another the federal insurers have gone from backing loans to repurchasing some of them to acquiring them wholesale. Now the public finds itself holding the paper on mortgages that no lender would have granted if the lender were to remain subject to the actual incurred risk.

And lo, and behold, those high risk home loans are failing. So, yes, we can ask ourselves what to do about regulating Wall Street and so on, but it's not just the private sector. The government -- our government -- did what we wanted and helped turn the mortgage market in particular into the unholy mess that it is today. It accomplished this brick by brick, year by year, and all entirely on the public record. So if you're over 25 and you want to grab the nearest culpable person in frustration and wring their neck, look in the mirror.

And if you're under 25, heh heh, uh... Sorry, kid.

Because they are trolls?